Portable electronic devices of various types have proliferated, aided by the wide availability and increasingly low cost of high-density memories and processing power. Personal digital assistants and hybrid devices such as cellular telephones are commonly used to store contact information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers and street addresses, which are also often kept on general-purpose computing devices. Many different types of devices, such as dedicated media players, cell phones, and general-purpose computing devices, are bring used to organize and play media content such as music and videos. This proliferation of devices storing the same type of data has led to widespread use of data synchronization between devices to maintain consistency, or to update one device's data from another's.
User-created tags are an increasingly popular way to organize assets such as email, web pages and photos. Tagging allows users to organize their content in ways that make sense to the user, without requiring a fixed structure or taxonomy.
Current technologies provide for synchronization on the basis of freshness of content, genre, and random selection. However, they do not provide for using tags to synchronize content. This restricts users from being able to use convenient, personalized and unstructured metadata when synchronizing, resulting in difficulty and wasted time due to the lack of control and necessity to either select content elements for synchronization manually or conform to structured data that may not reflect their preferred organization.
Accordingly, it would be useful to be able to use user-generated tags in synchronization of content elements.